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If you like to read Super Bowl ad roundups like I do, most of what you’ll encounter will debate which spots were funniest, weirdest, the most culturally relevant/divisive, or the most star‑studded.
I enjoy those takes. I have them too.
But as I watched the ads this year, a different lens kept pressing in—one that feels more relevant, and hopefully more useful, for anyone working in faith and human flourishing spaces.
In a culture marked by overload, anxiety, and fragmentation, attention isn’t neutral. Once you have it, you are forming people toward something, whether you intend to or not.
That means Super Bowl ads aren’t just entertainment. They are rehearsals for how attention is earned, shaped, and spent at scale.
The distinction I kept noticing was simple:
Some ads treated attention as something to be optimized, exploited, or anesthetized.
Others treated it as something to be stewarded and directed toward shared life.
For nonprofits—organizations that depend on attention not just to convert, but to cultivate conviction—that difference matters a lot.
Disruption Is Table Stakes Now
Disruption used to be the differentiator. It isn’t anymore.
In a noisy and hyper-saturated media environment, surprise, nostalgia, and novelty have become baseline tactics for disruption. But brands that disrupt in the loudest ways don’t necessarily win. Often, they simply add to the flood.
Matt Klein, Head of Foresight at Reddit, made a related observation in this year’s Meta Trends report, where he notes that we are living in a prolonged state of destabilization marked less by apathy than by overload. People haven’t given up; they’re just flooded.
In that environment, disruption is assumed. What matters is what attention is trained to value once it’s been captured.
This year’s Super Bowl ads revealed a clear divide between brands that treated attention as a resource to extract and brands that treated it as a responsibility to steward.
That’s the line this ranking follows.
Disruption That Opens People Outward (The Winners)
These ads earned attention by widening people’s field of concern. They assumed viewers were capable of care beyond themselves.
Lay’s: Last Harvest
Lay’s offered the clearest example of attention used well.
The ad centered on the people and systems that make consumption possible rather than the consumer. It moved beyond farm‑to‑table language into something more human: farmer to table.
The result was dignity, not sentimentality. Nostalgia functioned as a grounding mechanism rather than an escape. The product receded. The people remained.
Dove: The Game Is Ours
Of course Dove nailed it again. This time it stood out for its energy and clarity.
It named a real pressure and moved quickly toward agency rather than lingering in shame. The ad interrupted a harmful norm and offered a way forward without exploiting vulnerability in the process or getting bogged down in the theory of change of it all.
This matters. Cast vision by showing, not telling.
Starbucks: The Coffee Run
I’m not a huge Starbucks fan. Their coffee feels overrated and oversaturated.
But what made this ad so good is that it trusted something small.
By centering on a familiar ritual—a coffee run for others—Starbucks elevated shared experience without turning it into performance. On a night dominated by spectacle, it chose attentiveness. Win.
Novartis: Relax Your Tight End.
Novartis delivered one of the night’s quiet surprises.
The ad featured professional football players speaking candidly about health and vulnerability with disarming, tongue‑in‑“cheek” humor. But that levity didn’t trivialize the subject.
There was no spectacle. No fear-mongering. No attempt to shock. The message trusted the viewer to hold that tension rather than rushing them toward anxiety or action.
Ring: Search Party
I’m not a Ring guy, but that doesn’t keep me from admiring Ring’s “Search Party” spot. They took a familiar technology that inherintly focuses on individual security and reframed it around collective care.
At the end, the pitch wasn’t to get a Ring camera so that you can find your lost dog—it was to get a Ring camera to help others find their lost dogs. That’s a product pitch that is equally forming people toward collective flourishing.
Right Instinct, Uneven Execution (The Mixed)
This is where many of this year’s ads landed. They sensed something true about the moment but struggled to carry it all the way through.
Rather than individual hits or misses, a few shared patterns emerged.
Familiarity as Orientation
Several brands leaned on shared cultural memory to orient people in uncertainty.
Xfinity’s Jurassic Park spot was great. It handled this tension most carefully. It used a familiar story to ask a forward‑looking question, allowing the past to function as a reference point rather than a refuge.
Other ads hovered closer to the edge. Pokémon aimed for universal accessibility while relying on celebrity distance that subtly undercut it. Levi’s celebrated heritage and embodiment with confidence yet left an open question about direction.
Here, familiarity revealed its limits.
It can orient people forward—but only when it serves imagination rather than replacing it.
Clever Enough to Drift
Another cluster of ads demonstrated how easy it is for strong ideas to outpace clarity.
Instacart leaned into discomfort and cringe as a hook. The execution was memorable, but the experience lingered longer than the meaning.
e.l.f. offered one of the most culturally fluent moments of the night. It low-key said the quiet thing out loud by turning fears around a Spanish halftime show into a Spanish language appreciation moment dripping with telenovela‑style spectacle that was sharp, timely, and layered. But it stretched the connection between spectacle and product.
Both were smart. Both were well-crafted. In both cases, clarity was assumed rather than carried.
Formation Without Friction
A final group aimed at forming people toward something good but struggled to earn attention.
Blue Square Alliance exemplified this pattern. The ad carried a clear moral intention but with a too-familiar nonprofit tone. The tone was respectful but the disruption was minimal.
In an environment shaped by overload, formation that never disrupts often never registers at all.
Disruption That Collapses Inward (The Losers)
If the strongest ads widened attention outward, the weakest consistently pulled it inward.
These weren’t misfires by most metrics, but they were for me. Mainly because of how formative they were in the wrong direction.
Nostalgia as Anesthesia
Several ads leaned heavily on familiar cultural artifacts—old celebrities, old songs, old IP—as a way to hold attention without offering any real sense of direction.
Raisin Bran leaned into retro familiarity and light absurdity, landing as pleasant but forgettable. Dunkin’ relied again on self-aware celebrity nostalgia that generated recognition without asking anything new of the viewer. T‑Mobile took this impulse to its extreme, stacking legacy references and pop‑culture callbacks until the ad collapsed under its own weight. Genspark followed a similar path, borrowing cultural shorthand without offering orientation...Bueller?
Nostalgia here was less grounding than numbing. The past became a place to linger rather than a reference point for building forward.
Anxiety Without Care
Another cluster of ads surfaced real fears, then left people alone with them.
Squarespace raised a genuine pain point—scarcity, competition, the feeling of being boxed out—without offering any real resolution. Homes.com felt similarly disconnected from lived economic reality, landing as tone-deaf rather than empathetic. Bosch positioned inadequacy as the starting point, promising relief only after diminishing the self.
He Gets Us also belongs here this year. (And normally, I’m a big fanboy.)
The idea behind the spot was strong. It went directly after a feeling many people recognize and a lie many of us already know how to believe. The problem wasn’t the tension, it was named. It was the lack of care in how that tension was held.
The ad generated a kind of collective anxiety without offering a credible or embodied alternative. The hope it gestured toward felt distant, almost theoretical. In a moment like this, naming pain without showing a path forward risks leaving people more overwhelmed than seen.
Even as a follower of the Way of Jesus, I felt only triggered by hopelessness (and perhaps a bit of shame), rather than drawn into something that is supposed to be accessible—His burden is easy, and His yoke is light.
Attention intensified anxiety without providing care or agency in return.
Optimization as Salvation
A final pattern framed efficiency as the answer to deeper unease.
Hims & Hers leaned into comparison and envy, positioning success and self-improvement as something to be attained rather than formed. Alexa named widespread discomfort with AI while quietly suggesting that convenience was worth the tradeoffs. Ramp celebrated speed, productivity, and frictionless efficiency, quietly erasing collaboration, dependence, and the presence of other people in the process.
Smoother systems were treated as the goal. Formation was left unexamined.
Do I Have Your Attention?
I don’t know if I can say which ad “won” this year. That may no longer be the point.
What stayed with me was how clearly these ads revealed what we’re being trained to expect from attention itself.
Some assumed people are only anxious and self‑protective and optimized accordingly. Others believed people remain capable of care and responsibility and built from there.
Those assumptions appeared long before any product pitch.
Attention is one of the primary formation environments of our time. For those working in faith and human flourishing spaces, that makes attention a responsibility, not a tactic.
So the questions I’m carrying forward are these:
- Once attention is captured, what human posture does our work train?
- Does it widen concern beyond the self or keep people enclosed within it?
- When disruption introduces tension, do we resolve it with clarity—or suspend people in it to drive response?
- When familiarity appears, does it orient people toward a future they can imagine or anesthetize them against the present?
- If our work is effective by every visible metric, what kind of people does it quietly train them to become?
Those aren’t marketing questions.
They’re formation questions.
Why formation?
Well, in a culture this flooded, formation may be the most honest measure of effectiveness we have left.
